First up, Amazon announced it’s added “more than a thousand books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited,” its monthly subscription streaming offering for kids. Not surprisingly, Amazon didn’t provide subscriber numbers — though Kindle VP Peter Larsen said “the vast majority of our customers who take advantage of our one month free trial of FreeTime Unlimited choose to subscribe and enjoy our content library built just for kids.”

Of course, Amazon’s announcement refers to the Viacom shows that it grabbed exclusive rights to after Netflix lost them: “Among the content on FreeTime Unlimited are “exclusive Nick Jr. favorites from Viacom such as Dora The Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!, Blue’s Clues and The Backyardigans.”

Then Netflix announced that it’s launched a separate section of its site called Netflix Families, which “helps parents with the daunting task of entertaining kids this summer.” The site offers family recommendations in different categories (“family movie night,” etc.) as well as videos from parents about how they are “embracing the ease and flexibility of Netflix.” And Netflix notes that “Netflix works on almost any device with a broadband, WiFi or mobile data connection” — while Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is only available for the Kindle Fire.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / jwblinn

B&N reduced prices fairly drastically for Father’s Day, discounting its Nook tablets between $70 and $129. That was a big drop for a week-long promotion. But B&N said Monday that the slashed prices are sticking around for … well, at least for awhile, with no end date given, though it’s apparently still “limited-time pricing.”

So the 7-inch Nook HD tablet now starts at $129, down from $199, and the 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet now starts at $149, down from $269. The devices were both launched less than a year ago.

Nook Media President Jamie Iannone said this is to “help our customers gear up for a great summer reading season … We’re thrilled to keep in place our best prices ever and deliver great value to make reading more affordable.” But it’s not a great sign for the health of the Nook tablet business: If customers were snapping up these tablets, B&N wouldn’t have to slash their prices. To be sure, the 7-inch tablet market is crowded, but Amazon’s most basic 7-inch Kindle Fire is still $159 with ads and $174 without, while Google’s Nexus 7 starts at $199 (for 16 GB; the Kindle Fire and Nook HD start at 8 GB). The iPad Mini, meanwhile, starts at $329.

Plus, combine the price cuts with the multiple rumors that Barnes & Noble plans to phase out the Nook tablet line by the end of fiscal year 2014 (which would be a year from now) and it starts to look as if B&N is trying to clear out stock. (The company has already phased out the lower-end Nook Tablet and Nook Color.) We may get more answers from the company’s next earnings report, which comes out June 25.

The tablets were already available in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan (as well as the U.S., of course). While a 4G LTE version of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is available in the U.S., only Wi-Fi versions are available internationally.

“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” Dave Limp, VP Kindle, said in a statement.

In the U.S., the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, which is Amazon’s answer to the iPad, got a big price cut in March. The 4G LTE, 32 GB version, which had been $499, was cut to $399. The Wi-Fi-only version of the same tablet got a price cut of $30 — to $269 for the 16 GB version and $299 for the 32 GB version. Internationally, prices will vary based on operating costs.

“We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities,” Mike George, Amazon’s VP of apps and games, said in a statement. “Today is Day One for Coins.”

Users can buy 100 coins for $1, with discounts up to 10 percent for larger purchases. Developers get their standard 70 percent revenue share for purchases made with Amazon Coins.

This turns the Kindle Fire into a potentially lucrative product for Amazon, even though most believe it sells the Kindle Fire products near cost, if not below it. Even better: The combination of decreasing hardware prices over time and a rise in content sales — think apps, movies, books, music — will help the product line even more, according to Markkanen:

“Considering the probable margins of app and content sales, our research shows that Kindle Fire is a credible proposition. We expect that there will be a certain level of ‘innovation plateauing’ in mobile hardware taking place over the next five years, and that would certainly work in Amazon’s favor. Its future devices are likely to require less cross-subsidy than the ones we’ve seen so far.”

Markkanen may not have the exact figure for content profits required, but you can bet Amazon does. And this may be why the company wanted to retain control over mobile app pricing when it launched its alternative Appstore. By understanding consumer preferences perhaps better than any other online retailer, Amazon knows the right pricing “mix” for content sales to make money off hardware sales.

“We’re Barnes & Noble and books is one of our main categories,” Theresa Horner, B&N’s VP of digital content, said at a briefing Tuesday. I’d say it’s the main category, but either way, the company is using reading and recommendations as a selling point for the new tablets.

“You have an iPad, I have one”

Barnes & Noble is in a weird position because it’s not the iPad or the Kindle Fire. “You have an iPad, I have one,” said John Basanese, director of software QA engineering, at the briefing. The Nook HDs clearly aren’t in the same category as the iPad, but they’re also in the same range as a bunch of other budget tablets, and Nook devices haven’t been as popular as Kindles. So how does Barnes & Noble promote them? They do this by touting the tech specs — “the lightest, lowest full HD tablet ever,” with a display designed to take advantage of the new Nook Video — but also by promoting family-friendly and reading features.

First, the specs: The Nook HD has a 7-inch screen with 1440 x 900 resolution and 243 pixels per inch and supports 720p HD video playback. It comes in an 8 GB model ($199) and a 16 GB model ($229). Its battery life is up to 10.5 hours for reading and up to 9 hours of watching video.

The Nook HD+ has a 9-inch screen with 1920 x 1280 resolution and 256 pixels per inch and supports 1080 HD. It comes in a 16 GB model ($269) and a 32 GB model ($299), both of which are cheaper than the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with Wi-Fi. Its battery life is up to 10 hours of reading and up to 9 hours of video.

Both tablets have expandable memory, up to 64 GB and both have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No 3G, no 4G, no GPS.

In the US, the tablets can be preordered starting Wednesday and will ship in late October. They will also be available in the United Kingdom, beginning in late November.

The company declined to discuss whether earlier Nook tablet models get price drops with the launch of the new devices, but Chris Peifer, VP of digital development, said the Nook Color is “very close to its end” and the company is no longer making new ones.

On to those family-friendly features: “The average American woman’s hand is 172 millimeters,” and B&N says it designed the Nook HD so that the average women can easily hold it in one hand. This means the Nook HD is longer and skinnier than the Kindle Fire (both have the same size of screen but the Kindle Fire has a wider bezel).

At the briefing, company reps spent a disproportionately long time focusing on “family profiles,” which let parents and kids (up to six accounts total) share one device. Adults creating profiles for children can set limits on what their kids can and can’t do on the tablet. For example, they can ban shopping completely or allow “kid-friendly” shopping, which allows children only to access “safe” content from a preselected list. (Basanese mentioned “some self-published content” as an example of content that would not be kid-friendly.) The new Kindle Fires contain similar kid-limiting features.

Bringing “human” booksellers’ knowledge to the tablet

Until now, B&N’s chief Nook bookseller Jim Mustich said, the company hasn’t translated “all of the knowledge that makes our stores gathering places for people and allows people to discover things” into its devices. In other words, how do you bring a bricks-and-mortar bookstore experience to a tablet? “We’re tapping into the human knowledge of Barnes & Noble and our booksellers,” Mustich said.

So now you can browse Barnes & Noble’s store from directly inside a book. If you’re reading a Rachael Ray cookbook, for example, tap the bottom of the screen to pull up other books by her and similar titles. “We’re trying to integrate that shopping experience from right inside the book,” Horner said. “We don’t require somebody to go to the shop.”

The company is introducing “Nook Channels,” curated collections of books that “speak to a certain type of reading or a certain type of content.” Mustich says the company had the idea when he and B&N CEO William Lynch were in an elevator together and Lynch mentioned that he’d liked Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and wanted to read other books like it. If you look up that title in other online bookstores, Mustich says, “you get a high-school reading list, books like The Great Gatsby, when what you really want is James Salter.”  The channels have titles like “Digging into Murder,” “Jane Austen & Heirs,” and “International Intrigue.” Each contains 40 to 50 titles, most curated by Barnes & Noble booksellers. The channels will eventually include other types of content, too (like movies), and users will be able to improve recommendations by ‘liking’ or ‘not liking’ books that pop up in their stream.

It’s our job to “tease out what the reader likes,” Mustich said. “We really want the discovery process to be associated with the Nook.”

Similarly, on the home screen of the new Nook HDs, there’s a “Your Nook Today” button. Tap it and it pulls up the weather in your city, a book recommendation based on the content on your device, and “a three-minute read,” a short piece of editorial content that Mustich described as “a small way to promote engagement.”

“Rip out the page”

With the new tablets, Barnes & Noble is improving its magazine-reading experience and also adding about 100 catalogs — from retailers like L.L. Bean and Pottery Barn — for free browsing. Users can pinch out to view a “visual table of contents, and tap products in a catalog to buy them online. In a Pinterest-inspired feature, they can also “rip out a page” from a catalog or magazine by swiping their finger down the screen. This adds the page to a “scrapbook” that can be accessed from the tablet’s home screen, so users can create inspirational idea books on different themes. This only works on catalogs and on magazines that you purchase, of course. It doesn’t apply to books and the scrapbooks can’t be exported to Pinterest or as a PDF, which limits this feature’s usefulness. Still, it’s interesting to see a tablet incorporate these curating and pinning features.

Kindle Paperwhite

• high-def front-lit display
• longer battery life
• starting at $119; 3G $179

Kindle

• small revamp
• $69

Kindle Fire

• faster processor
• twice the memory
• longer battery life
• $159

Kindle Fire HD 

• 16 GB
• Front-facing HD camera
• 7 inch and 8.9 inch
• $199 (7-inch) and $299 (8.9-inch)
• 11 hours battery life (7 inch)

Kindle Fire HD 4G LTE

• 32 GB
• 8.9 inch
• $499

Kindle Serials

• episodes update automatically
• $1.99

Here’s the news so far:

• Amazon announces a new Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite, that sports a high-definition, front-lit display and has much longer battery life. It’s available starting Oct. 1 for $119.
• The 3G version of the Paperwhite will be $179.
• The original ad-supported Kindle is getting a small revamp and a price drop to $69.
• Kindle Serials: readers buy once, receive author updated episodes automatically.
• A new Kindle Fire with a lower price of $159.
• Kindle Fire HD, which will come in two models, 7-inch and 10-inch 8.9-inch.
• The 7-inch 16GB Kindle Fire HD will cost $199, the 8.9-inch version $299, shipping Nov. 20.
• Yet another Kindle Fire HD: this time with 4G LTE wireless connectivity. At 8.9 inches and 32 GB, it’ll cost the same as the entry-level iPad, $499.
• The LTE version’s baseline data plan starts at $50 per year, comes with 250MB of data per month and 20GB cloud storage.

Front-lit Kindle Touch

Since Barnes & Noble introduced the front-lit Nook with GlowLight in April, we’ve been waiting for a response from Amazon. The Verge has leaked images of the “Kindle Paperwhite,” which appears to be a front-lit Kindle Touch with a whiter, brighter and higher-resolution screen. The text on the images is in French and promises eight hours weeks of battery life even with the light on. It also looks as if Amazon has revamped the Kindle Store on the device, adding an option to see (and possibly download) the ebooks you’ve stored in the cloud.

Kindle Fire with camera and mapping

Also at The Verge are a couple pictures of a Kindle Fire with what appears to be a front-facing camera (the old Kindle Fire has no camera) and video chat.

Reuters reports the new Kindle Fire will also have mapping capabilities, citing unidentified sources: “Amazon will also add location capabilities to the new Kindle Fire, which requires either a GPS chip or a process known as Wi-Fi triangulation.” As my colleague Ki Mae Heussner reported in July, Amazon bought 3D mapping startup UpNext; Reuters says Nokia is providing the mapping technology.

New content deals for Amazon Prime Instant Video

In an effort to compete with Netflix and HBO Go, Amazon is actively building its free streaming video offerings, which are free to Amazon Prime members (who pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and other perks). The company recently signed a deal with NBCUniversal for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “Battlestar Galactica,” bringing the total number of movies and TV episodes it offers to over 22,000. And it launched an instant video iPad app in early August.

The press conference’s Los Angeles location could suggest new movie or TV partnerships, and the NYT‘s  David Pogue said in this week’s column that “an imminent Amazon deal will bring thousands more movies to its catalog, I hear.”

Amazon has never released an actual Kindle Fire sales number, so the 22 percent figure constitutes an unusual disclosure for the company. Even so, we don’t know how large Amazon thinks the entire U.S. tablet market is. I asked the company but don’t expect to get a number in response. Mashable suggests Amazon is going by this recent estimate from consulting firm Frank N. Magid.

Research firm IHS iSuppli says Apple’s iPad makes up 70 percent of tablet shipments worldwide — with Kindle Fire accounting for just 4.2 percent of global tablet shipments in Q2 2012. Since the Kindle Fire is sold only in the United States, though, its market share here is higher. Assuming that the iPad makes up at least 50 percent of U.S. tablet sales — a recent report estimated Apple at 55 percent and Android at 35 percent, though that was before the very successful launch of the iPad 3 – a 22 percent market share for Kindle Fire isn’t outrageous, though IHS’s data showed that Kindle Fire’s worldwide market share is falling.

So how many Kindle Fires have actually been sold? Using figures from the Apple-Samsung lawsuit to estimate the size of the rest of the U.S. tablet market, Publishers Marketplace estimates that Amazon sold 6.1 million Kindle Fires over nine months. That’s far below early analyst estimates, which had suggested Amazon would sell 6 million Kindle Fires in a single quarter – and with new competitors like the $199 Google Nexus 7, the pressure is on for Amazon to announce something impressive at its event next week.